Monthly: January, 2017

I’ve been working away on my latest app, and was just creating a new piece of artwork for the splash screen. When I did this, I wanted to start with the iPad Pro 12″ and scale down within Photoshop to maximise the quality of each asset size.

For all of my other assets, I had started with the iPad for some stupid reason and got my math all confused.

So I went hunting for a guide, and found an old site from Ben Lew of Pi’ikea St. It was a little out of date, plus I really wanted to calculate the sizes using the iPad Pro as the starting point.

So I took Ben’s page and popped it into a spreadsheet. The result is available below for download. I’ve also taken a screenshot so that you can see it easily.

In Photoshop, something Ben taught me to do a few years back was to create a layer called “default”, and, in order to get Photoshop to export the various layers in my file as appropriately sized assets, add the sizes as percentages along with folder names.

For me, assuming my originals are for the iPad Pro 12″, this means I give my ‘default’ layer the name:

As some may be aware, the Parse service is to be shutdown on the 28th of January. Parse gave developers 12 months to sort ourselves out and find another place to host our data, and drive our services.

I’ve been using Parse for a couple of years now, to provide a push notification service to my uAlertMe app. I was looking at removing the app from the app store, and discontinuing support, because I couldn’t find a cost effective way to keep it all running. uAlertMe is an app that sells perhaps 200 copies a year, so there’s not enough income to cover monthly service fees.

Then, late in 2016 I saw a message on one of the local developer groups that Buddy had established a relationship with Parse, and were providing a wonderful migration tool to allow us, in a relatively pain free manner, take our data from the existing Parse service, import it into Buddy, and (hopefully) sit back.

Now I’d have to say that it wan’t quite that easy. Because I jumped on board pretty quickly, and because I wanted to use the Push notification system, I was wanting to use features that hadn’t been completely polished.

So, with some really terrific support from the kind folks at Buddy, I worked on getting everything working, and as of today, iAlertU and uAlertMe are happily talking via Parse on Buddy.

So, if you still haven’t migrated your Parse data, and are wondering what to do, you have 21 days (as I write this) remaining. Get on over to Buddy and get the process started.